New Ballet Choreographers at Miller Theatre

New Ballet Choreographers
Miller Theatre, Columbia University
Works & Process at the Guggenheim
September 16, 2006

Program:
Softly as I Speak
Them
Für Alina
Masada

Tom Gold, why have you been hiding your choreographic talent from us? All these years I thought you were (just) a fine dancer, but now you have caused the scales to fall from our eyes with your bright, witty piece Masada, set to John Zorn. After viewing three ballets whose general outlook, themes, and choreography were to varying degrees trapped by the current Euro-acrobatic-angst model, how wonderfully surprising it was to see you taking the chance of going against the grain, and succeeding.

Gold’s piece was pretty much the standout of the evening, but all the works had their merits. Two of the ballets presented were by Edwaard Liang, Softly as I Speak, to the fifth movement of Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 5, and Für Alina, to Arvo Pärt, while Brian Reeder’s Them, to Jefferson Friedman’s String Quartet No. 2 was sandwiched between them. (It was wonderful to have live accompaniment to all the ballets.) Softly is a pas de deux for Maria Kowroski and Albert Evans, while Für Alina was for Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall. Liang is himself an excellent dancer and performer, and I liked the previous ballet he made for Wendy Whelan that he showed a couple of years ago, and which was danced recently at New York City Ballet, but I think he misses with these two pieces. Softly had some interesting moments, mostly for Albert Evans, but in general there’s just too much posing, too much of those Christopher Wheeldon-like wheeling lifts, and just not enough dancing. Für Alina began (and ended, as you might have guessed; it’s become a cliché to end where we began) with Whelan on the floor downstage right, picking imaginary daisies or something, accompanied by much angst-ridden arm movements. Craig Hall stands over there—no over there—according to the effects of an overused lighting device. While both of these pieces were beautifully danced with great sincerity by Kowroski and Evans, and Whelan and Hall, they simply fail to engage the enormous talents these dancers possess. (But how great it is to see them up close; the Miller’s stage is so small, you could see, in particular, how Kowroski was forced to restrain her momentum so she wouldn’t land like Derek Jeter in the first rows of the audience.)

Them, the Brian Reeder piece, was set for a male soloist (Joseph Gorak), three women (Leann Underwood, Faye Hideko Warren and Devon Teuscher) and three men (Thomas Forster, Eric Tamm and Roddy Doble). This piece grew more confident as it went along; while the first movement seemed only to convey teen angst, by the end of the piece Reeder seemed to have figured out how to convey this as expressionistic movement so that it became interesting and had moments of real depth, rather than being merely heavy-handed. The second movement had some interesting choreography for the shifting duo/trio combinations, but often the classical ballet vocabulary seemed jarring against the lugubrious string quartet to which it was applied. Nonetheless, at least the piece had a point to make, and Reeder stuck to it and followed through. Again, the ballet was beautifully danced (the dancers are all part of the ABT Studio Company).

After these three dark (in all senses—musically, choreographically, and visually) ballets, I expected more of the same from Masada (Masada? The place where the Jewish prisoners made a last desperate stand against the Romans? What else to expect but more darkness and angst?). It was so nice to be wrong. This was a sunny work, and somehow Gold managed, with only simple costumes, and without the benefit of sets, but primarily through movement—how rare is that—to conjure up the Israeli seashore (at least that’s what I got). The terrific dancers here, Ashley Bouder and Sean Suozzi (Sean: it’s ok to show some facial expression once in awhile), with Tiler Peck, Georgina Pazcoguin, Sterling Hyltin and Ana Sophia Scheller, were given just about everything a dancer could want: challenging, fun, inventive (yes, inventive!) choreography. The other key thing about this piece that made it good was that Gold didn’t give them steps that didn’t have a rhyme or reason: there was not much that was superfluous. It all fit, and it mostly all worked. That was great to see. Let’s see more.

Kansas City Ballet

Kansas City Ballet
Battery Park, Manhattan
"Evening Stars," River to River Festival
September 6, 2006

Program:
Jaywalk
Sentinel
Meditation
The Catherine Wheel Suite

Occasionally sharing the stage with a scene-stealing bat (not the baseball kind), the Kansas City Ballet (that’s Missouri, not Kansas) brought four pieces to New York that showed them off as a likeable, hard-working group of dancers. Jaywalk, choreographed by William Whitener, showed their jazzy-theatrical side; Sentinel (David Berkey) and Meditation (Jacques d’Amboise; these short pieces replaced Todd Bolender’s The Still Point), their modern/classical side; and the Twyla Tharp Catherine Wheel Suite, their gutsy fearless side. While the Tharp piece was most likely the biggest draw of the evening, and it was certainly the flashiest, it wasn’t the piece that I liked the best. Granted, what we saw was not the entire work (which I’ve never seen), so it was hard to fit the three sections that were presented into any kind of context. And, while I have always loved David Byrne’s music (it was great to hear it on this beautiful evening) I couldn’t help wondering how suitable it was for a ballet; like Tharp’s (pretty awful) Beethoven’s Seventh ballet for the New York City Ballet a few years ago, I wonder whether she is sometimes overoptimistic about the suitability of certain pieces of music, however terrific they may sound, for the creation of cohesive, interesting choreography.

The piece that I thought the dancers looked best in was the Berkey piece, Sentinel, set to Brahms and danced by four men, all wearing white, Christopher Barksdale, Matthew Donnell, Paris Wilcox and Lateef Williams. Not an overly-ambitious piece, not filled with blindingly original choreography or anything like that, but an unpretentious, sincere work, that was danced with a simplicity and honesty that was very refreshing and very pleasant. (The piece includes a moment when the men, facing the audience right diagonal, bend to one knee and make a sweeping gesture with their right arm—whether this alluded to the final moment of Balanchine’s Emeralds or not I don’t know, but it made me remember that the Paris Opéra’s performance on PBS last week omitted that melancholic final section). The dancers may have had to work harder at, and were probably more challenged by, the Tharp; but in the end, I found Sentinel to be the more rewarding piece.